Politics: Winner Takes All
Norquist, Grover G.
and their Muscovite masters, acutely aware of how poorly this would play in America a half-century ago, turned the tables adroitly. Those who properly denounced the "informing," routinely carried...
...If the 2000 election were a boxingmatch, it would cheer the promoters that the two contestants are very evenly matched and that this is the third in an ongoing series of grudge matches following the 1994 GOP capture of the House and Senate...
...The American Spectator • April 1999 67...
...Republicans swept suburbs, small towns, and rural America...
...the flow of union and trial lawyer money (and of illegal millions from Communist China and Indonesia) in 1996 and 1998 were warm-ups...
...For Democrats and the left, everything's at stake, and they will stage an all-or-nothing counterattack on the Republicans in 2000...
...After 1960, though the Democrats had regained the presidency and held both houses, the ideology of Washington didn't shift...
...Remember: Bill Clinton brought the Democratic Party the prize it had almost given up on—the presidency...
...His peers recognize this as a rare and invaluable skill...
...The political machines of Baltimore, Chicago, Pittsburgh, et al...
...Federal taxation takes money from the Republican suburbs and ships it to the Big City machines, which would collapse without such support...
...On election day 1998, the 12 percent of American voters living in cities with populations of more than 5oo,000 voted 82-to-18 for Democratic congressional candidates...
...In 1952, Republicans won the presidency and both houses from the Democrats, yet the liberal drift in policy was hardly affected...
...With Reagan's first victory in 1980, 34 Republican representatives were swept into Congress...
...History suggests that the presidential election could help decide whether the GOP keeps its narrow six-vote majority in the House...
...The president bombs Afghanistan, Sudan, and Iraq for domestic political reasons as all three networks and the Democratic Party machinery call this patriotism...
...John Judis of the New Republic has endorsed Blumenthal, defending the hatchet-man of the Clintonocracy on the basis of their shared employment by In These Times, a leftist tabloid that tried its best to meld the politics of Tom Hayden with the journalistic methods of the National Enquirer, but ultimately failed...
...Cockburn, now spreading Stalinist-like slanders about Hitchens, is the son of a Stalinist agent, Claud Cockburn, whodefamed Orwell and his comrades back in Barcelona in 1937...
...The left also has emotional reasons to support Clinton...
...This is roughly the amount of money the Republican National Committee spends in a decade...
...If every worker's Beck rights were protected by an executive order, and if every worker took advantage of them, unions would lose 82 percent of their annual dues...
...That's $8 billion each year...
...The few principled liberals who've criticized Clinton for betraying liberal values have been brushed aside by former allies now focused solely on maintaining power...
...are not financed solely by looting the local populations, since the most likely targets for looting have long fled to the suburbs...
...When the Contract With America nationalized the election in 1994, Republicans won 52 of those seats...
...The bipartisan auto-choice legislation introduced by Senators Mitch McConnell, Slade Gorton, Joseph Lieberman, Patrick Moynihan, and Reps...
...Todd Gitlin, in the New York Observer, has excoriated Hitch as a Trotskyite unwilling to join the totalitarian liberals in the Popular Front with Slick Willie...
...Welfare reform has liberated six million Americans from dependency and put a lie to the left's claim of to "compassion...
...If only lo percent of union members exercised their Beck rights it would cost the unions The 2000 elections will decide the Democrats' future...
...A Los Angeles Times poll over the same period found Texas Governor George W. Bush running ahead of Vice President Gore by 57-39 percent...
...GROVER G. NORQUIST is president of Americans for Tax Reform...
...Clinton carries on in the two-faced tradition of those "conservative" House Democrats—talk right, vote left...
...A Republican Washington could enact a modest version of Paycheck Protection or implement the 1998 Supreme Court ruling that workers may be compelled to pay union dues only for the "maintenance and negotiation" of their own contracts...
...A strong presidential candidate and a united party will be very important for Republicans at all levels...
...Dick Armey and Jim Moran would allow Americans to buy auto insurance covering all real costs of damage to car and person, while waiving the right to sue for "pain and suffering...
...Modest tort reform, much of which has been actively considered by committees in both chambers, would break the trial lawyers, second only to the unions as a source of funds for the left...
...Clinton signed the first tax cut legislation in 16 years (which was passed with Democratic votes) and weakened the politics of class envy...
...66 April 1999 • The American Spectator S800 million a year...
...Today there are very few "boll weevils" or "Blue Dog Democrats," and very few "Rockefeller Republicans...
...A Zogby poll of 923 likely voters on January 26-28 (after the impeachment vote) found that voters planned to vote 40-39 Republican over Democrat for Congress...
...Naturally, he, like Katha Pollitt, has seized on Hitchens's defense of Orwell's "snitching" to explain his alleged "betrayal" of Blumenthal...
...This time it might even be true...
...The x-factor favoring the Democrats is that they are playing for their very survival...
...Those who properly denounced the "informing," routinely carried out by American Communists in the service of the KGB, were themselves labeled "informers...
...Unlike the preceding contests—mere skirmishes without long-term repercussions — "this election" is supposed to set the stage for the next decade, generation, century...
...Readers who wonder if this is overstating the threat will find corroboration of these predictions in the behavior of the left during the Clinton administration...
...The good news for Republicans is that they withstood all-out attacks in the last two election cycles...
...And this does not require a jihad against organized labor—simply the reinstatement of Executive Order 12800, issued by George Bush in the final days of his presidency and repealed in the dark of night by Clinton in January 1993...
...Such a policy would lower insurance costs by 25-33 percent and avoid most expensive lawsuits...
...Sixteen more came in 1984...
...Clinton entered the race in 1992 when all the smart Democrats were taking a pass on running because it would be "impossible" to defeat George Bush, the hero of the Gulf War...
...Losing him to impeachment, or having Gore lose in 2000, would extend the left's 25 years of serial humiliation...
...If everyone in the nation took this option, American consumers would save $35 billion each year, and trial lawyers would lose more than $10 billion a year in contingency fees...
...On the other hand, Jimmy Carter gained only one House seat in '76 and Clinton lost ten seats in '92...
...As presently constituted, the Democratic Party cannot survive two years of moderately successful, united Republican rule...
...The 1997 tax cut that conservatives rightly derided as too small also contained a capital gains and death tax cut and an expansion of IRAs for savers —all successfully defeated only eight years earlier when proposed by George Bush...
...For the first time in over a century, Americans are competing not just for party control of the presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court, but for ideological control of those institutions...
...When 1994 showed the weakness of the Democratic Party and the unpopularity of the left's political program, Clinton was able to regroup and win the White House again two years later—albeit with 49 percent of the vote...
...In the 1980's, Newt Gingrich argued that the Democrats could maintain control of the House only because 6o Democrats, while voting liberal and party-line in Washington, talked conservative in their home districts...
...On the ideas front the left is everywhere in retreat...
...The 22 percent of voters in cities of 5o,000 to 500,000 voted 52-to-48 Democratic...
...In 1996 Clinton picked up nine House seats for Democrats...
...Federal legislation could roll back the $2o-3o billion in legal fees now scheduled to be paid trial lawyers—often for almost no work— in the states' assault on the tobacco companies, and would prevent the otherwise inevitable wave of copycat lawsuits against beer and spirits, guns, automobiles, this year's "unhealthy" foods, and other politically incorrect products or services...
...Liberals have watchedas everything they said about the Cold War and the nature of the Soviet Union and Hiss and the Rosenbergs has been exposed as a lie...
...And the Big City machines are central to Democratic voter turnout...
...In the test vote on impeachment there were only five Democrats who voted "yes" and only five Republicans who voted "no...
...If the Republicans elect a president in 2000 to go along with a slight increase in their congressional majorities, they can and will enact reforms that will break the pillars of the Democratic Party's national structure: labor unions, trial lawyers, and Big City machines...
...In the case of Communications Workers ofAmer- ica v. Beck, this was found to be 18 percent of total dues...
...Democrats have signed on to the death penalty, making for a bipartisan populist success...
...The danger for Republicans is that the stakes are not the same for both parties...
...The Democrats are playing for their very survival...
...Edward Jay Epstein, who charges Hitchens with Holocaust denial, first became famous serving America's enemies by attacking the Warren Commission 35 years ago...
...To crush the structures of the left will not require heavy lifting or strong presidential leadership—just a willingness to sign modest legislation heretofore stopped only by Clinton's veto threat...
...As recently as 1992, Clinton's presidential victory and Democratic control of Congress were not enough to pass a BTU tax, a $16 billion "stimulus" package, or socialized health care...
...Their otherwise inexplicable defense of Clinton and Clinton-ism shows they understand that they teeter over the abyss...
...A Republican administration allied with a Republican Congress could pass modest reforms in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the food stamp programs, and the Department of Education that would ensure that federal money flows to poor people and not to the political machines that control America's major cities...
...On November 7, 2000, all three branches of government—executive, legislative, and judiciary—will be at stake...
...Some things don't change after all...
...The Republicans and Democrats go into the 2000 elections evenly matched...
...Clinton has humiliated, betrayed, and used the left in his six years as president, and still its members cling to him as if he were the only thing standing between them and oblivion...
...It's also likely that the next president will appoint three Supreme Court justices and set the governing majority of the Court for years to come...
...POLITICS by Grover G. Norquist Winner Takes All E very two years the leaders of both political parties address their key coalition members and solemnly pronounce the next election to be the most important in a generation...
Vol. 32 • April 1999 • No. 4
